Our Literature
On the gloomy days, when the American catastrophes are too much to bear, I turn to my bookcases for solace and even something like friendship, and the shelves throw a welcoming arm over me. The bookcases are organized on the principle of no principle, and nowhere among them is there a section dedicated strictly to the traumas and treasures of life in our unhappy country. Still, scattered here and about are a number of squat volumes in sumptuous black dust jackets, all of the same height, devoted to flights of the American imagination — a sufficient number of those books, such that, if I ever gathered them together, a proper bookcase devoted to them alone would stand before me. These are volumes in the publishing series called the Library of America, which brings out the classics of American literature, Emerson and Mark Twain and little-known names like William Bartram, the ornithologist, and onward to Saul Bellow and beyond, perhaps too much beyond, in a uniform edition.
One of those volumes plops into my hand. The cover is maybe a little too sumptuous. A glossy ribbon of red, white, and blue traverses the middle, as if it were a military sash on a colonel’s dress uniform. The publisher’s logo at the bottom of the spine is the Stars and Stripes, configured to suggest an open book. When I open the actual book, still more stars and more stripes blink upwards from the endpapers and the flyleaves. It is the Fourth of July. A tiny bugle says hello every time a page turns. Patriotism at the Library of America does not suffer from timidity. But I do like the feel of those books on my fingers, their heft, the cloth binding, the texture of the paper, and the buttery black dust jackets.
It was Edmund Wilson who proposed the idea for those books, and his way of doing so figures in the lore of the series. He came up with the idea during World War II, which was perhaps not an ideal moment for founding a new literary institution. Nor was he in command of major finances, or any finances at all, though significant financing was going to be needed. Still, he talked up his idea, and he persisted in doing so into the 1950s. And only in the 1960s, at a vexing moment in his life, did signs of progress come his way. He was in trouble for non-payment of taxes. The IRS was threatening to jail him. And Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who was a White House assistant to President John F. Kennedy, put in a word on his behalf.
Kennedy turned out to be an Edmund Wilson admirer. This was not an obvious thing to be, from a White House standpoint. Wilson had lately published a book about the Civil War in which he described Lincoln as a tyrant and the United States as a sea slug. And just then, in 1963, he published a pamphlet, The Cold War and the Income Tax, in which he explained that, given how abhorrent was America’s foreign policy, he was right not to have paid his income tax. But Kennedy was a lucid thinker. Apart from encouraging the tax authorities to show mercy, he decided to award Wilson a Medal of Freedom. The IRS objected. The president responded: “This is not an award for good conduct but for literary merit.” In one of the sections of The Cold War and the Income Tax, Wilson sketched his concept for a publishing series of the American classics. And Kennedy wrote a letter endorsing the idea.
Wilson had competitors and enemies beyond the IRS, though. These included the academic literary scholars and their professional organization, the Modern Language Association, or MLA. The scholars and the MLA were promoting their own editions of American literary classics at the university presses. The MLA and the universities commanded a degree of political influence, and they stymied Wilson’s project at every turn, even if he did have a letter from the president. Wilson needed to enlist the support of major foundations, and the MLA made sure to get in his way. Finally he wrote up his frustrations in an essay called “The Fruits of the MLA,” which ran in two parts in the New York Review of Books. By then it was 1968, a year of insurrectionary riots, and Wilson, nothing loath, went about staging his own riot in the pages of the essay. He explained that some of the supreme classics of the American literary past had fallen out of print, which was a disgrace. He explained that still other classics had remained in print, but only in editions published by the university presses in conformity with the MLA’s very exacting scholarly principles.
Wilson was endowed with a regal self-confidence, and he had come to feel that, if anyone could speak on behalf of America’s literature across the centuries, he was that person. And, on behalf of American literature, he had no patience for the MLA and its scholarly principles. He observed that, under the MLA’s supervision, teams of academic scholars had gotten hold of various writings by William Dean Howells, or Melville, or Mark Twain, and had pickled them in footnotes and pointless annotations, which rendered the books unreadable. The labor that had gone into amassing those scholarly annotations was, in Wilson’s word, a “boondoggle.” The book prices of the unreadable university editions, thanks to the boondoggle, rendered the books unaffordable, except to institutions.
And then, having paused (as his readers may imagine) to pour himself another martini, he threw in a few remarks on the nature of academic life more generally in America. He noted a preposterous quality: “the absurdity of our oppressive PhD system of which we would have been well rid if, at the time of the First World War, when we were renaming our hamburgers Salisbury Steak and our sauerkraut Liberty Cabbage, we had decided to scrap it as a German atrocity.” He noted the consequences of this academic system for American literature: “The indiscriminate greed for this literary garbage on the part of the universities is a sign of the academic pedantry on which American Lit. has been stranded.”
In other countries, he observed, publishers had figured out how to preserve and present their own national literatures in attractive formats. The model was the Bibliothèque da la Pléiade in France, which published a “library” or series of the leading French writers from across the centuries. The Pléiade volumes were leather-bound and handsomely designed, and, to judge from the displays in the French bookstores, they were a popular success, too. Perhaps if Wilson had been in less of a rush to show the United States at a disadvantage, he might have noted that, in spite of every achievement, the Pléiade had a lore of its own, some of which might bring us to reflect, by way of contrast, on America’s virtues. The Pléiade was not founded by one of the old-time French publishers, but, instead, by an immigrant to France who was Jacques Schiffrin, from Russia. Schiffrin got the project started in 1931 with a little help from André Gide, plus some investments from Peggy Guggenheim. Schiffrin was a crafty publisher, resourceful in his frugality. I know this because one day at the Strand second- hand bookstore in New York I bought an ancient copy of the original volume in his series, an edition of Baudelaire, only to discover that, when I went to read it, the decaying leather cover split apart and revealed a padding of old newspapers. This filled me with respect, once I had gotten over my indignation. Luxury leathers and gilt lettering (another feature of the series) were meant to be alluring. But the series was also meant to be accessible to a large public.
And, to be sure, with the moderate prices that penny-pinching made possible, the Pléiade right away became too big for Schiffrin to handle on his own. With Gide’s help, he merged it into the much larger publishing house that was Gaston Gallimard’s. Only, a difficulty arose. In 1940, under German rule, the Aryan code went into effect, and, because Schiffrin was not only Russian but Jewish, Gallimard dismissed him from the house and kept the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade for himself. Schiffrin and his family just barely succeeded in escaping to Morocco, and then, once again with Gide’s help, to New York — a story that was told some years ago by Schiffrin’s son, the late André Schiffrin, an eminent American publisher, in his memoir A Political Education. But the German occupation came to an end, and Gaston Gallimard turned out to be content with how things had worked out. Jacques Schiffrin’s keenest desire was to return to France and resume his old responsibilities and prestige at the Gallimard house as the publisher of the Bibliothèqe de la Pléiade. But Gaston Gallimard was not interested in sharing what by then he regarded as his, and he went on publishing the series by himself.
About the books themselves, though, Wilson was right. The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade was a beautiful series, all in all. A reader today may have to imagine some of the beauty, given that in our own era France’s version of the MLA has achieved an influence over the Pléiade, and various editions in the series have come to resemble the American university editions that Wilson so vigorously detested. Svelte volumes from the early years have swollen into fat little things, bulging with hundreds of pages of arcane scholarly annotations, printed in type fonts so tiny as to resemble dust motes. Endnote numbers creep across the pages like insects. And the book prices have swollen in tandem with the annotations. In Wilson’s time, however, the Pléiade volumes were designed to fit into a man’s coat pocket or a lady’s purse. They were books that a reader could carry to the locations where reading actually takes place, which is not typically the university library, but may be, instead, the garden bench, or the café table, or the subway, or, for people such as Wilson, who used to read while walking the streets, the busy sidewalk. And the texts were uncluttered with notes and footnotes. You could read those books without feeling that a miniature professor was hectoring you from the bottom of the page.
So he proposed an American series on the model of the early Pléiade. It was a project to bring into print and keep in print first-rate editions of the principal and well-remembered American writers of long ago. And the project was to bring into print the not-so-well-remembered writers, too, if their works were of permanent value — the historical writings, for instance, of Francis Parkman, the author in the late nineteenth century of France and England in North America, about the European colonizers and the Indians. Parkman, in Wilson’s estimation, was one of the American masters of historical literature, whose works had disappeared almost entirely from the bookstores. By presenting his argument for this sort of thing in the New York Review, and by launching his insults at the universities and their indiscriminate greed for academic garbage, and by pointing out academic boondoggles, he succeeded finally in attracting sympathetic attention from people with institutional power.
His co-conspirator in this enterprise was the publisher Jason Epstein, a generation younger than himself, who was a pioneer of paperback publishing in the United States, not to mention one of the founders of the New York Review. And Epstein began, at last, to make progress. He did this at the Ford Foundation, where President Kennedy’s National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, one of the colossally failed architects of the Vietnam War, had ended up in charge; and again at the National Endowment for the Humanities, during the period when Joseph Duffey (who died not long ago), was President Jimmy Carter’s appointee. It was a tale of bureaucratic machinations and big guns of the Democratic Party, as recounted a few years ago by David Skinner in the NEH magazine, Humanities. The progress was less than rapid.
By the time the initial volumes made their way into the bookstores, it was 1982, and Wilson was ten years gone. And yet those first volumes turned out to be faithful to Wilson’s original concept in every way, except perhaps in their chunky size, which was not nearly as compact as the Pléiade editions. Also, it is hard to imagine how Wilson might have reacted to the Fourth of July bric-à-brac. But the basics were correct. The volumes were free of disfiguring footnotes and other scholarly intrusions. A small amount of useful information was tucked, instead, discreetly into the back pages, where it belongs. The initial set of books were by authors whose names would define the project for the general public: Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe. One of the Hawthorne volumes was not up to standard. The editors chopped up Hawthorne’s short-story collections and, in a professorial sneak-attack, rearranged the stories in a pedantic order of their own. The other volumes were superb. And, in homage to Wilson, the initial set was followed right away by two volumes of Parkman’s history of colonial North America, even if Parkman’s volumes were never going to be a commercial success.
The Library of America adhered to one more concept of Wilson’s, which was fundamental to him, though it was not something that he went on about in The Cold War and the Income Tax or in the New York Review of Books. This was still another inspiration that he drew from the French — in this instance from Hippolyte Taine, the literary critic, who was a great passion of Wilson’s. Taine, back in the 1860s, was the founder of modern literary theory — the founder, that is, of the idea that literature ought to have a theory, and science ought to be its basis. In Taine’s view, the moral sciences and the physical sciences were ultimately the same, and the science of literature ought to be comparable in some way to physiology or chemistry. He explained it in the introduction to his monumental History of English Literature: “No matter if the facts be physical or moral, they all have their causes; there is a cause for ambition, for courage, for truth, as there is for digestion, for muscular movement, for animal heat. Vice and virtue are products, like vitriol and sugar; and every complex phenomenon arises from other, more simple phenomena on which it hangs.”
The simple phenomena that bore on the science of literature added up, in Taine’s formula, to race, place, and time. This meant, respectively, the influence of ethnic or national traits on literature; the influence of geographical location; and the influence of historical events. It is true that, in elaborating these ideas, Taine arrived sometimes at dubious judgments. The Aryan races, he figured, were beautifully poetic, metaphysically gifted, and scientifically innovative, whereas the Semitic races were faultily poetic, metaphysically stunted, non-scientific, and fanatical — which, then again, perhaps proves Taine’s thesis by showing that he, too, was a man of his race, place, and time.
The belief that he had come up with something scientific filled him, in any case, with confident energy. Taine was superbly well-read in one language after another, vivid in his descriptions, skilled in his summaries. And the science itself, such as it was, allowed him to conjure a living quality in the history of literature. He pictured a world populated by writers across the generations, neighbors, and kinsmen of one another, engaged in the easy conversation of people who share a background and inhabit the same terrain, even if they do not inhabit the same century — writers who produce their individual works, and, at the same time, by entering into colloquy with one another across the ages, produce the cumulative thing that is a national literature.
Taine saw a triumphal quality in all this. It was the triumph of individual temperament, one writer after another, set against the landscape of national traits and the past; and, then again, a triumph of the national temperament. And he saw a heroic quality in his own enterprise, as the scientific historian of literature. He believed that, by revealing the material factors that enter into literature, and by revealing the literary traits that result, he had uncovered the mechanisms that would permit writers and critics in the future to confer a conscious shape on the evolution of their own national literatures. We could become, in his phrase from an essay in 1866, “masters of our destiny.”
Wilson adored Taine even as a child. His father kept an English translation of the History of English Literature on his shelves at home in New Jersey, and those volumes appear to have been young Wilson’s introduction to criticism and the history of literature. It was Taine whom Wilson read in the street, as a young man in New York. He wrote at length about Taine in his study of Marxism, To the Finland Station, which came out in 1940. But his principal effort to bring Taine to bear on questions of his own time was in a book that he published three years later, even if, on that next occasion, he did not invoke Taine overtly. This was The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It — one of Wilson’s most brilliant books, though one of his least known, and long and egregiously out of print.
The Shock of Recognition is a compendium of commentaries by leading American writers (plus one or two Europeans) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the work of other leading American writers, perhaps from their own epoch or from an earlier one. These are commentaries by writers who have felt a shock of recognition upon reading one another — commentaries that amount to an ardent and even intimate conversation between one writer and the next. Wilson drew his title from Melville’s essay, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” which expresses how excited Melville was to discover the profundities of Hawthorne. But there is also a commentary by Henry James on Hawthorne, and by T.S. Eliot on Henry James and Hawthorne both, and so forth, with each entry presented by an omniscient Wilson, who, like Taine, appears to be at home across the entire reach of literature everywhere.
The immediate purpose of the book was to make accessible a series of lively discussions, some of them not well-known. But the larger purpose was to demonstrate that an American literature does exist — a national literature in Taine’s sense, consisting of conversation across the generations among writers whose social backgrounds and language and dwelling places and shared historical experiences lend coherence to their discussion. The notion that an American literature exists was a nationalist conceit in the decades immediately before the Civil War. Sometimes it was a battle-cry for worldwide democratic revolution, no less, as in Melville’s essay on Hawthorne, or in Whitman’s poetry. But even in those years the idea of a national literature seemed to be more of a slogan or an aspiration than a description of reality.
For wasn’t American literature mostly a stunted and provincial branch of the fertile literature that was England’s — even if a few blowhards were claiming otherwise? Wasn’t the soil of American civilization too thin to produce a genuine literature — even if now and then a lonely genius wandered out of the forest and published a book? Wasn’t America’s truest talent a gift for inventing industrial gadgets, and not for expanding the literary imagination? Those were Henry James’s beliefs. But Wilson wanted to demonstrate that American writers did recognize one another, and they did so from one generation to the next, and they did not merely look to England and Europe. The American writers understood their project to be in some respect cumulative. And their conversation was itself a literary achievement — an imaginative reflection on the American imagination over the course of time. Here, in sum, was a consciousness that was also a self-consciousness — “the developing self-consciousness of the American genius,” in Wilson’s phrase.
He himself was a classic representative of the long American tradition, in its original and narrowly tribal version. Wilson was a Mather on his mother’s side, descended collaterally from the Puritan divines, which meant that he came from the same Calvinist background that, half a century before he was born, which was in 1895, had produced all but a few of the writers from those earlier times whom we still read today. It was natural for him to think of the literature in its long history as an extended conversation within a relatively cozy world of families and schoolmates and neighbors, which is how things did use to be in nineteenth-century New England — with an additional branch in a New York that descended from the Dutch, and another branch in the white South. About the African-American branch he was willfully ignorant, which I suppose is likewise the tradition, though in Wilson’s case the willfulness is hard to understand. He was a contributor to V. F. Calverton’s Modern Monthly in the 1930s and friendly with Calverton himself, and he had to go out of his way not to draw something for The Shock of Recognition from Calverton’s much-admired Modern Library compendium from 1929, An Anthology of American Negro Literature, a pioneering work.
And yet he did understand that, even in his own intimate circles, the old American coziness was giving way to something more capacious. The most talented of his own closest literary companions when he was young — his Princeton schoolmate F. Scott Fitzgerald and their Vassar contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay — were Irish Catholics, which, ethno-religiously speaking, represented a bit of a novelty in American literature. The novel development suggested still more novelties to come. And they came. These were developments that might have given pause to Hippolyte Taine. Then again, Taine, too, understood that populations change, and national cultures adapt and advance. The great forward step for English literature, in Taine’s interpretation, was achieved, after all, as a result of the Norman conquest of 1066, which allowed the French to civilize the Saxon barbarians. The non-WASP conquest of a previously WASP literature in the United States, then, the arrival not just of Irish Catholics but of everyone else as well, on top of the contributors to Calverton’s anthology, who had been here all along — this did not have to be a bad thing.
But the old American tradition, the central trunk, did have to be rendered accessible to people who might not come by it in the simple way that Wilson did, amid the marvels of father’s bookshelves, or bestowed upon him by a beloved English teacher at prep school. Here was an obvious purpose of The Shock of Recognition. It was to show writers and readers that a self-aware American tradition did exist, and to display its nature, and to allow everybody to enter into it. Or the purpose, more grandly, was to show Americans what was American civilization, from the standpoint of the writers whom he took to be the central personalities. He had given up Marxism only recently, but he retained something of the deep idea that had animated him during his Marxist years, which was the ambition, Taine’s and Marx’s alike, to put knowledge to practical use and become “masters of our destiny,” which in this instance meant becoming conscious of our own culture and capable of adapting it as we like.
Wilson came up with his proposal for an American Pléiade in the same period, and it should be obvious that in doing so he was extending what he had done in The Shock of Recognition. His compendium of American commentaries was 1,300 pages and came to an end in 1938. But the proposed new book series of American classics was going to be, in principle, endlessly elastic. In this respect, too, it was going to resemble the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, whose own series has by now expanded to some eight hundred volumes, which is perhaps too many — a concession to the need for annual commercial successes of some kind, even if the Pléiade editors can reasonably explain that the French literary tradition is, in fact, enormous. (And the editors can explain that, because the French tradition has sometimes claimed to be a universal tradition, they have reason to publish writers from other languages, too, in French translation.) And so it has been with the Library of America, which has likewise expanded.
There are some three hundred volumes in the Library of America by now, which is more than sufficient in some ways, and less than sufficient in other ways. Among those hundreds of books are boxed sets of science fiction and sports writing, not to mention a volume of commentaries on Peanuts, the Charlie Brown cartoon, which, to be sure, is imaginative. And snobbism is yesterday’s yesterday. And a good essay is a good essay. Still, an extra couple of volumes of Whitman are crying out to be included. There is an original sin to overcome in Whitman’s case, which was that, because he was such an outsider, nobody in his own time ever brought out the shelf-long Complete Works that were standard for the other great writers. But he is, after all, the national poet, and shouldn’t his complete poetry, and not just Leaves of Grass, be easily available, and his literary criticism, and his political essays? The Library of America has brought out two volumes of Wilson himself, as is appropriate. And yet another four or five Wilson volumes are likewise crying out for inclusion: his study of the American Indians, his labor reporting, his essays on Canadian literature, his study of Marxism, his novels, his poetry, and his book about the literature of the Civil War, not to mention his private journals, which are marvelous. The original Pléiade ambition was, after all, to publish full editions of the major writers, and not just a couple of representative works, which meant Gide’s journals and not just his novels and essays. But I do not mean to complain. The Library of America has just now brought out an unpublished novel of Richard Wright’s, The Man Who Lived Underground, thereby rescuing Wright, not for the first time, from the unappreciative and censorious publishers of his own era, which is precisely the mission: to preserve and protect the American literature.
I wonder if something like the Library of America could ever be founded in an era like our own. Wilson’s proposal ran into obstacles that were daunting enough, such that it was forty years before his project came to anything. But at least in those years America enjoyed a degree of self-confidence, culturally speaking, and the Democratic Party was not averse to occasional feats of policy innovation. It should be remembered that, in the Kennedy and Johnson era, the New Frontier and the Great Society were not just programs for social reform at home and democracy promotion abroad, but were also, in a small degree, intended to shore up the national culture. Kennedy made a point of turning the White House into a center for the arts, and Johnson took the impresario instinct to another level by establishing the National Endowment for the Humanities and its sister, the National Endowment for the Arts, quite as if arts and letters were matters equal in dignity, if not in budget, to agriculture and transportation. The Library of America was one more of those new institutions, on a miniature scale. It was different only in that, after the NEH funding had gotten it launched, the winds of independent financing filled its modest sails, and onward it floated, propelled now and then by further gusts of NEH beneficence, and guided not at all by Washington, but, instead, by Wilson’s colleague Epstein, and his own colleagues and successors. Those were cultural achievements of the Democratic Party, directly or indirectly.
Only, that was long ago. Today everybody understands that anyone who stood up to speak on behalf of the higher zones of the national imagination would get shouted down at once in the name of one or the other of populism’s contemporary demands, which are the leftwing demand for identity representation and the rightwing demand for a dismantling of higher zones in general. And the Democratic Party could hardly be expected to rise above those debates. I wonder even if anybody in the upper ranks of the party has given thought to these matters. If the Democrats did stop to reflect, however, they might observe that America’s political troubles right now appear to descend in some degree from a collapse in cultural understandings, which might suggest that, back in the day, John Kennedy and the Johnson administration were on to something with their cultural promotions, and some kind of policy to shore up the culture and its literature would fit rather well with policies meant to shore up the highways and the climate.
But I never meant to go on about politics. How did I even get started? I began this reflection standing in front of my bookcases, fondling one book or another as they slip into my hands — here is Emerson: Selected Journals 1820-1842, and here is Emerson: Selected Journals 1841-1877 — precisely in the hope of leaving politics and its miseries behind. I wanted a vacation from the politicians. I wanted to read about the Over-Soul! But there are no vacations. The times are to blame, of course. Or maybe the volumes are to blame, with their Fourth of July covers and the spangled logos. Or the Biden administration is to blame, with its repeated and all-too-thrilling echoings of Democratic Party grandeurs of long ago.